George Orwell: A Life in Letters (55 page)

Love to Mamaine. It is beautiful spring weather at last and daffodils out all over the place. Each winter I find it harder and harder to believe that spring will actually come.

Yours

George

[XVIII, 2955, pp.213–4; typewritten]

1
.
International Rescue and Relief Committee.

2
.
Michael Foot (1913–2010), politician, writer, and journalist, for much of his life on the extreme left of the Labour Party, was MP for Devonport, 1945–55; for Ebbw Vale, 1960–92 and
Leader of the Labour Party (in Opposition), 1980–83. For
Tribune
he was assistant editor, 1937–38; Managing Director, 1945–7
4; editor, 1948–52, 1955–60. His many books include
Guilty Men
(with Frank Owen and Peter Howard, 1940),
The Pen and the Sword
(1957),
The Politics of Paradise
(1988).

3
.
John Randal Baker (1900–1984), Reader in Cytology, Oxford University, 1955–67; joint editor of the
Journal of Microscopical Science
, 1
946–64; Professorial Fellow, New College Oxford, 1964–67. He received the Oliver Bird Medal for researches into chemical contraception in 1958. Baker was an important influence on Orwell (see
19.3.47
).

4
.
Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975) was Buchanan Professor of Animal Genetics, University of Edinburgh. His publications include
The Scientific Attitude
(1941), and
The Ethical Animal
(1960). Orwell, while at the BBC, engaged him to broadcast talks to India.

5
.
The
Modern Quarterly
, founded 1938, aimed at contributing to a realistic, social revaluation of the arts and sciences, devoting special attention to studies based upon the materialistic interpretation of the universe. It lapsed during the war and was revived in December 1945, with Dr John Lewis as editor. Marxist in outlook, with many eminent scientists as contributors, it attacked, among other things, what it called ‘persistent attempts to confuse moral issues’, for example, Orwell’s ‘sophistries’ in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ in
Polemic
(XVII, 2668
,
pp. 141–
57
), which was translated and published in French, Dutch, Italian, and Finnish journals.

To Yvonne Davet*

8 April 1946

27B Canonbury Square,

Islington, N 1

Chère Madame Davet,

I have just received your letter of the 6th. Two or three days ago I met Mademoiselle Odile Pathé, the publisher who is going to bring out
Animal
Farm
.
I didn’t know she was in London, but she rang me up. I told her you had translated
Homage to Catalonia
, and that you had sent her the translation, but I suppose she won’t be back in France until next week. She seemed to me to have a lot more courage than most publishers, and she explained that because she is in Monaco, she has less to fear
¹
than the others, except for the paper. In any case
Homage to Catalonia
is a much less dangerous book than
Animal Farm
.
It seems that the Communists now exert direct censorship on French publishers (I have heard they have ‘prohibited’ Gallimard publishing Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
), and it’s quite clear that they wouldn’t let
Animal Farm
get through if they could find a way of suppressing it. If Mademoiselle Pathé has the courage to publish one book, she would have the courage to publish the other, if it seemed worth her while financially.

As for the essays, let me explain how things stand. In 1940 I published a book,
Inside the Whale
, which didn’t sell very well, and shortly afterwards nearly all the copies were destroyed in the blitz. The book I’ve just published contains two of the original essays (there were only three), and eight others that I’d published in magazines in the last five years. One, or perhaps two, have a purely English interest. (One is on boys’ weeklies, the other on comic postcards—which are after all pretty similar in France.) At the moment Nagel Paris have a copy of
Inside the Whale—
they asked for it before the publication of
Critical Essays
.
I can’t quite remember whether a copy of
Critical Essays
was sent to a French publisher,
²
but I’ll ask my agent. If there was a question of translating one or the other, naturally it would be better to choose
Critical Essays
.
Anyway, I’ll send you a copy as soon as possible, but I haven’t got one at the moment. The first edition is out of print, and the second edition hasn’t come out. One could easily publish the book without the essays of purely local interest. I certainly think the essay on Dickens is worth translating.

Recently I had a letter from Victor Serge,
³
who is in Mexico, and who is going to send me the manuscript of his memoirs. I hope my publisher, Warburg, will publish them.

At the end of April I’m going to leave London to spend six months in Scotland, but I’m not sure precisely when I’m going, as there will certainly be problems in sending on the furniture. My house is in the Hebrides, and I hope to be fairly quiet so that I can start a new novel. In the last few years I’ve been writing three articles a week, and I’m dreadfully tired. My little boy is very well. I’m sending a photograph of the two of us. It looks as if I’m giving him a good spanking, but really I’m changing his trousers.
⁴
Before I go I’ll send you my new address.

Très amicalement

George Orwell

[XVIII, 2963, pp. 226–8; typewritten; original in French]

1
.
From Communist pressure.

2
.
Three publishers were tried.

3
.
Victor Serge (pseudonym of Viktor Kibal’chiche, 1890–1947), edited
L’Anarchie,
Paris; imprisoned 1912–17 because of his political activities. He attempted to return to Russia in 1917 but was interned and only got to Russia in 1
919. He worked with the International Secretariat until disillusioned following the Krondstadt incident, 1921 (see
15.12.46
, n. 3). He then worked in Berlin and Vienna for the Comintern. In 1926 returned to Russia and allied himself with Trotsky but was expelled from the Party and in 1933 internally exiled to Orenburg. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936. He became Paris correspondent of the
POUM
during the Spanish civil war. He settled in Mexico in 1941 where he died impoverished. His
Case of Comrade Tulayev
was published by Penguin (2004).

4
.
Presumably the photograph reproduced as plate 69 in
The World of George Orwell
, edited by Miriam Gross (1971).

To Inez Holden*

9 April 1946

27B Canonbury Square

Islington N
1

Dear Inez,

I’m sorry I didn’t answer your earlier letter. I’ve been smothered under work as usual. Your second one, dated March 31st, reached me yesterday. You seem to be having quite an eventful time. I’m glad you got over your illness—I always say that being ill is part of the itinerary in a trip like that. It’s due to draughts or the change of diet or something. I have wondered several times whether I detected some of your stuff in the
Observer
—or are you only collecting stuff to write when you come back? I thought you’d probably notice more about what people were eating and so on than the average observer, and I thought perhaps you had done part of ‘Peregrine’
¹
one week.

Not a great deal has happened here. I expect to go away about the end of the month, but there’s still a lot of nightmares about repairs to the house and sending furniture.
It’s unfortunate that Susan has been ill and may have to go into hospital. If she does I shall have to park Richard at a nursery school for a couple of months, because I can’t manage him singlehanded for that length of time and anyway I want to go up and get the Jura house livable as soon as the repairs are done. I’m going down to Wallington tomorrow to sort out the furniture and books, and then I hope Pickford’s man will come along and tell me when he can remove the stuff. I’ve also got to buy a lot of stuff. This kind of thing is a complete nightmare to me, but I’ve no one I can shove it on to.

It’s been quite nice spring weather here, on and off. Richard is extremely well, but is still not talking. He learned to blow a whistle lately, which was rather an affliction for a few days, however luckily he got tired of it.
Animal Farm
is being translated into 9 languages altogether and one or two of the translations have arrived. It is due to come out in the
USA
soon. I met the person who is publishing it in France, who turns out to be a woman who has her establishment in Monte Carlo, where she is a little safer than she would be in France. It seems the unofficial censorship in France itself is awful now.

I’ll write and tell Karl
²
about his parents. I haven’t seen him since you left. He was very down in the mouth about not being allowed to go back to Germany—at the same time, of course, other people who don’t want to go back to their own countries are being made to. You didn’t say when you are coming back. As soon as we have the Jura house running I hope you’ll come and stay. I think it could be very nice there in the summer once the house is in proper trim.

With love

George

P.S. Isn’t it strange, we got a vacuum cleaner recently and Richard is terrified of it. He starts yelling as soon as he sees it, even before it is turned on, and in fact we can’t use it when he is in the house. My theory is that he gets some kind of vibration from it which gives him an electric shock.

[XVIII, 2965, pp. 230–1; typewritten]

1
.
A gossip column.

2
.
Karl Schnetzler (1906– ), German electrical research engineer. He worked in England, 1935–39, but was then interned (though a refugee) until 1943. He was naturalised British in 1948. He accompanied Eileen when she visited Orwell at Preston Hall Sanatorium. None of his letters to Orwell or those from Orwell to him have been traced. Orwell attempted, through Michael Foot,
M P
, to again permission for him to visit Germany to see his parents but this was unsuccessful. (See also
1.3.39
, n. 1.)

To Philip Rahv*

9 April 1946

27 B Canonbury Square

Islington N 1

Dear Rahv,

Thanks for your letter of April 4th. I note that you want the next ‘London Letter’ by about May 20th, and I will despatch it early in May. I am going to drop all my journalistic work here and go to Scotland for 6 months as from about the end of April, but I haven’t definitely fixed the date of leaving yet. As soon as I do I’ll send you my new address, but any way letters sent to the above would get to me.

Yes, I saw the article in
Time
,
¹
which was a bit of good luck. I have no doubt the book
²
will be subject to some boycotting, but so far as this country is concerned I have been surprised by the unfriendly reactions it
didn’t
get. It is being translated into 9 languages. The most difficult to arrange was French. One publisher signed a contract and then said it was ‘impossible’ for political reasons, others made similar answers—however, I have fixed it with a publisher who is in Monte Carlo and thus feels a bit safer. She is a woman, Odille Pathé, and worth keeping in mind for people who have unpopular books to translate, as she seems to have courage, which is not common in France these last few years. I have no doubt what Camus said was quite true. I am told French publishers are now ‘commanded’ by Aragon
³
and others not to publish undesirable books (according to my information, Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls
was one such). The Communists have no actual jurisdiction in the matter, but it would be in their power, eg., to set fire to a publisher’s buildings with the connivance of the police. I don’t know how long this kind of thing will go on. In England feeling has undoubtedly been growing against the C.P. In France a year ago I got the impression that hardly anyone cares a damn any longer about freedom of the press etc. The occupation seemed to me to have had a terrible crushing effect even upon people like Trotskyists: or maybe a sort of intellectual decadence had set in years before the war. The only Frenchman I met at that [time] to whom I felt I could talk freely was a man named Raimbaud, a hunchback, who was one of the editors of the little near-Trotskyist weekly
Libertés
. The queer thing is that with all this moral decay there has over the past decade or so been much more literary
talent
in France than in England, or than anywhere else, I should say.